Monitoring and Collecting in Colorado

I’ve been on the job for just over a month now, and with field season in full swing, I have been busy travelling to collect seeds, monitor rare plants, and help out with other projects as needed. The other CLM interns at the BLM state office and I have taken a few breaks from Plant Business to help out Jay Thompson, a BLM fisheries biologist, with a couple of small projects. We traveled with Jay to an alpine wetland at Dyer’s Gulch to survey the site for boreal toads. We didn’t find any. But we did find massive amounts of Colorado blue columbine (Aquilegia coerulea) in bloom as well as marsh marigold (Caltha leptosepala), both of which we hope to collect in the near future. I was also excited to find snow willow (Salix nivalis), a dwarf willow only a couple inches tall, which serves as an adaptation to the harsh conditions above the timberline.

Just yesterday we also assisted Jay with some benthic macroinvertebrate sampling at Grizzly Creek near Kremmling, CO. This is an interesting technique that uses the community composition of macroinvertebrates in the stream bed to gauge water quality at a given site. The samples we took will be sent to a lab for thorough analysis and identification, but we were able to notice some apparent differences between sites. For instance, we only found water boatmen at our first site, which seemed, superficially at least, to be less impacted than the other stream sites we sampled. I found this trip to be fun and interesting, and a nice change of pace to look at things with legs.

But enough of this “legs” nonsense–back to plants! Our team has also been busy monitoring two federally listed plants, Astragalus osterhoutii and Penstemon penlandii, which are both endemic to the area near Kremmling in Middle Park. Astragalus osterhoutii, which our mentor Carol Dawson has been monitoring for years, is particularly interesting because when conditions are poor (such as during the drought of recent years), it can remain dormant for several years, waiting until conditions improve to produce aboveground stems. Carol has had each individual within several study plots tagged and numbered, and our monitoring consisted of locating tagged individuals and assessing the presence, number, and flowering/fruiting success of aboveground stems.

Meanwhile, we have continued to scout and make collections for Seeds of Success, most recently collecting Geum triflorum, a cute little rose with nodding pink blossoms, the common name of which is, adorably, old man’s whiskers, presumably referring to the fuzzy nature of the fruits as they mature.